Civic Projects Directory 268
Code for Philly volunteers give back to our community by donating their skills and time towards not-for-profit, civic-minded, open source projects. Browse our community’s project directory to identify where you can volunteer.
New to Volunteering?
If you’re new to volunteering or creating your own project, please check out our Projects 101 Blueprint slides.
For detailed advice on starting your own project, check out our own github ‘getting started’ project repo.
FYI - All our Projects 101 content is open source. Submit your own pull request to make it better with your own suggestions!
Remember, you’re a part of a national community of civic hackers
Check out Code for America’s project page for more opportunities to volunteer or for inspiration on the next project to start here in Philly.
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Clean & Green Philly Maintaining
Clean & Green Philly
Philadelphia has a gun violence problem. This dashboard aims to help solve it by empowering community groups to carry out cleaning and greening interventions in the vacant properties where they can have the biggest impact.
Motivation
Philadelphia has a gun violence problem. Homicides have been on the rise since 2013. The past three years—2020, 2021, and 2022—have been the deadliest on record, with a high of 562 homicides in 2021. Community members need solutions, but many city-run initiatives are frustratingly slow or inadequate. Nearly 80% of the…
Balancer: AI-powered Bipolar Medication Decision Support App Prototyping
Balancer seeks to solve the problems created by the trial-and-error decision-making process that psychiatrists/medication prescribers and patients go through when choosing medications for bipolar disorder.
If you're interested in getting involved, email kjost@codeforphilly.org or go to https://www.codeforphilly.org/chat and introduce yourself in the #balancer channel. Kat Jost (@itskatnotcat) and Tai Chan (@tai) are the project co-leads.
Project Overview
The mission of the Balancer project is to shorten the journey for patients with bipolar disorder to find stability on…
Relative Mouse Accuracy Test Bootstrapping
Eye-tracking is an amazing accessibility tool, but there are so few ways to figure out your best setup to get the best results.
There are currently no good tools, that I could find, to test the accuracy and consistency of eye-tracking mouse control across devices and programs, and I believe this information will greatly help in improving the technology in the future.
A fairly simple Python or JavaScript program should be able to provide this need:
The script starts by prompting the user to enter a seed value, which is used to generate a set of 25 random dots on the screen….
Siuba: fast, flexible data science with python Testing
This project has two major goals:
- help people learn data science with python.
- build siuba into fast and friendly tool for data analysis.
It can be hard to get started analyzing data, so a major piece will be figuring out some format for teaching beginners (e.g. running weekly analysis sessions, workshops, etc..).
Background
siuba is an open source python library designed for quick, interactive data analysis. It's a port of the tidyverse from R to python, and supports a tabular data…
MATchMapper Hibernating
Philadelphia is among the cities hit hardest by the opioid crisis. Medication-assisted treatment (MAT), particularly buprenorphine, is identified as “the gold standard of care” for opioid use disorder. Unfortunately, information on the availability of MAT is currently spread across multiple databases and search tools. Furthermore, many listings are outdated. Any given search thus…
Philadelphia Bail Fund Interactive Data Portal Prototyping
Philadelphia Bail Fund (PBF) is a revolving fund that posts bail for people who are indigent and cannot afford bail. Our goal is to keep families and communities together and vigorously advocate for the end to cash bail in Philadelphia.
This project aims to provide up to date reports and visualizations on bail, and to track over time its adverse impacts on different populations (e.g. its impact on poorer areas, based on race, or those in jails during the covid 19 pandemic). These reports can educate the public and hold decision makers accountable.
They currently obtain…
CHIME: COVID-19 Hospital Impact Model for Epidemics Testing
Hey! If you're at this page you're hopefully looking to help out with the CHIME project. Please join us in Slack or on github to join in!
Help needed
In order to ensure the CHIME team can focus on modeling and interacting with stakeholders, we're looking for help filling the following roles:
Project / product management: help with organizing the project. Help make sure that work around explaining and improving the CHIME dashboard is well organized. Help us document the project so volunteers can contribute.
Devops: help ensure that the dashboard can handle the…
Computer Vision for Prevention Point Forms Prototyping
Computer Vision for Prevention Point Forms
Prevention Point collects data via handwritten forms. This project seeks to use computer vision to eliminate the need to do data entry by hand.
This project is to design a piece of software to record information from scanned forms for Prevention Point. This project utilizes openCV and the Microsoft Azure API. Please contact the project lead on slack on how to get access the API key.
Main Project Parts
1. Form Intake Interface
There are several different types of forms that need to be scanned. The form intake…
Reach: SMS Hotline & Integrated Case Management System Maintaining
Reach: SMS Hotline Platform with Integrated Case Management System
This is an SMS Hotline platform developed to facilitate a Warm Handoff to treatment services for overdose survivors. Reach connects people in need with service professionals at any hour of the day and across geographic barriers using SMS.
Reach's integrated case management systems allows for the collection of de-identified data which can be analyzed to find gaps in services, and inform needs assessments and feasibility studies for the expansion and creation of services tailored to community needs.
Together, this…
PAWS Data Pipeline Prototyping
WHO IS PAWS - As the city's largest animal rescue partner and no-kill animal shelter, PAWS is working to make Philadelphia a place where every healthy and treatable pet is guaranteed a home. Since inception over 10 years ago, PAWS has rescued and placed 27,000+ animals in adoptive and foster homes, and has worked to prevent pet homelessness by providing 86,000+ low-cost spay/neuter services and affordable vet care to 227,000+ clinic patients. Just in 2018, 3,584 animals were rescued and 36,871 clinic patients were served. PAWS is funded 100% through donations, with 91 cents of every dollar…
Tools for Sealing and Expunging Criminal Records in Pennsylvania Testing
Clean Slate Buddy
Community Legal Services is a private nonprofit that provides civil legal representation to thousands of low-income Philadelphians every year. CLS's Employment Unit helps clients' secure employment by expunging and sealing criminal records. CLS also maintains the Expungement Generator, a web application that nonprofits across the state use to automate creating and filing expungement petitions.
In 2018, Pennsylvania's legislature enacted Clean Slate, which provides for automated sealing of 30 million + criminal cases. Clean Slate also created rules for…
Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity - Criminal Record Expungement & Pardons Testing
Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity (PLSE) is a non-profit legal aid organization that focuses on helping people overcome the barriers they face as a result of criminal records.
The project we are currently working on is building out an expungement petition generator for PLSE. The application takes in PDFs of clients' criminal dockets and returns fully formatted petitions to expunge the clients' criminal records. Having a clear criminal record helps those clients to better find work, housing, and services.
This project is built with React.js, Django, PostgreSQL, and MySQL. A…
Prevention Point Unified Reporting System Prototyping
Prevention Point is a private nonprofit organization providing harm reduction services to Philadelphia and the surrounding area.
Currently, they are storing data from their programs in separate Excel spreadsheets, disparate EHRs, and partner data systems. This prevents them from being able to see all activities associated with an individual program participant, and also makes it impossible for them to do meaningful analyses that monitor program health and evaluate efforts.
This project would work to migrate all of the disparate data sources into one system,…
School Budget Aggregator Commenting
The School District of Philadelphia has released School Budget information for the 2019 Fiscal Year as a collection of PDFs, one for each school. This Python download script (in the form of a Jupyter Notebook) aggregates these budgets and outputs them in a few CSVs.
Trashinator Prototyping
Make less trash!
Every year, the City of Philadelphia disposes 1 ton of waste per resident. That is … impressive. The city has also made it a goal to eliminate litter and landfill use by 2035.
What about us?
How much trash do we generate? What's normal? What's possible? I want to find out so that we can finally throw away the name "Filthadelphia."
This is a simple web-app to let you keep track of your estimated landfill use.
Help out!
Right now it would be especially helpful to have:
- Beta…
Cypher Philly Prototyping
Cypher Philly Project Wiki
The Idea:
The Philly Graph DB meetup group has started a new initiative called Cypher Philly. The initiative is intended to inspire and equip citizen journalists, data enthusiasts and social activists with the tools and data to do good for the city and citizens of Philadelphia.
There are a number of reasons why Philadelphia needs your help from public safety issues, to beautifying shared public spaces or even unheard police complaints. Our goal is to harness the untapped potential of OpenDataPhilly.org…
FortifyingFamilies Prototyping
Fortifying Families is an app for families/friends/advocates/supporters of incarcerated persons to assist the returning citizen in the reentry process.
Philly Zoning Maps Testing
Philadelphia Zoning Analysis
The goal of this project is to map and analyze Philadelphia zoning, particularly the impact of the reforms that were implemented in 2012.
Stately Testing
Form-driven workflow engine. Making city government better, one form at a time.
Government, like many organizations, have a ton of processes. For example:
- Leave request
- employee submits form, manager approves, entry is able to be looked up later
- Travel request
- like leave request, but director must also approve, and if >$500, CFO must approve
- New hire onboarding
- multiple tasks that can be completed asynchronously. perhaps when all 3 tasks are done, the 4th task is able to begin
- Contract
- Document-oriented (w/signature) vs content-oriented
- Freedom of…
Project Cognoma: Putting machine learning in the hands of cancer biologists Maintaining
Putting machine learning in the hands of cancer biologists.
Jail Jawn Maintaining
Jail Jawn
Data Source: (http://www.phila.gov/prisons/page.htm)
What is Jail Jawn and Why?
This is the repository for the JailJawn.com scraper code written in Python. This started as a project to learn Python and Serverless deployment.
The following code in the repository accesses the static page provided by The City of Philadelphia Department of Prisons Census page (http://www.phila.gov/prisons/page.htm). This web page is generated internally possible by a human at infrequent times using Excel to HTML which doesn't create clean tables for scraping which requires a custom…
Leverage: Philly Campaign Finance Prototyping
The goal of Leverage is to empower citizens of Philadelphia to use campaign finance data when making informed decisions about who they donate to, who they support, and who they vote for.
The foundation of Leverage is the campaign finance data published by the City of Philadelphia. On top of the data we are building a simple user interface with a search feature that leads to a few visualizations.
Our Guiding Principles
- Empower citizens to make informed decisions.
- Not to single out individual contributors (we're not doing this to facilitate punitive actions)
- Keep in mind…
Female Political Representation in PA Bootstrapping
Some women from Rittenhouse Political stopped by Code for Philly a month or two ago to ask for help with a data set in CSV. They would like to visually display the data in tables, graphs, and ultimately a "heat map" to show how women have been represented in PA from 2000-2014. Click the developer's link to go to the GitHub page. We are working in Python and potentially JavaScript down the line to display this data in a palatable manner for end users.
Energy Consumption Visualization Prototyping
The goal of the energy consumption visualization tool is to enable interested stakeholders to be able to gain invaluable insight into their building energy usage and use it in making informed decisions about energy efficiency, investment in renewable energy, and overall sustainability.
This project uses the Department of Energy's Standard Energy Efficiency Data: https://energy.gov/eere/buildings/standard-energy-efficiency-data-platform
Philadelphia Municipal Building Energy Benchmarking Bootstrapping
The Philadelphia Department of Energy has data available on opendataphilly.org (link below) showing energy consumption for Philadelphia Municipal Buildings between 2011-13. They are looking to add 2014 in the near future. They have asked us to help analyze and present the data so that the information is palatable for Philadelphians interested in creating energy efficient buildings. The Department of Energy has invested money in projects to help make some of our older municipal buildings become more energy efficient. They'd like to help voters understand the impact of their tax dollars on…
Database Management System Prototyping
Travel with me as I discover the ins and outs of a catalog database
Social Hub For Programmers Commenting
I want to create a social hub for programmers to do daily challenges. The objective of this project is to create a website where users can post programming questions and users are allowed to challenge them by answer the programming question. In the end establishing a community of programming elites. Does anyone want to hop onboard?
Philly Transpo Art Prototyping
About
A view of the [select] modes of transport, revealed by activation, to illustrate the levels/amount/rate of movement across the city.
Bike share pods flash when the number of bikes available changes (currently 15 minute intervals) Rail stations change with frequency of service during 15 minute windows (radius changes for heavy rail, opacity changes for light rail) Bus routes traced by shooters (eventually will glow more heavily based on bus frequency) See @karaml's project pitch here.
Data
Quasi-realtime data from the…
Code Help Desk Maintaining
This is the help desk table for questions that you may not have awnsers to, headed by patrick and karin we will try to help you with you're codeing probles
Text Alerts for Job Postings Commenting
Many people seeking employment have sparse availability to the internet. Without smartphones or consistent access to the internet, it is very difficult to respond to job postings in a timely manner. This application will ingest relevant job postings from popular websites, filter out only those that indicate they can be contacted by phone, and parse the postings into a 140-character explanation that can include the phone number, hourly wage, address, and title of that posting. People can sign up for certain job searches such as 'warehouse philadelphia', and receive text messages when a new,…
phlAddrParse Commenting
First Line Address Parser and Standardizer
Will work on any US based first line address but standardizations are tweaked specifically for Philadelphia addresses.
Does not handle City, State, ZIPCode
GIVEN:
123R-27 north ben Franklin blv apt 2b and s pine av
RETURNS:
O,123,127,123R,127R,N,BENJAMIN FRANKLIN,BLVD„APT 2B,S,PINE,AVE„
WHERE
FIELD | EXAMPLE | DESCRIPTION |
---|---|---|
oeb | O | address number/range, Odd, Even, Both |
alow | 123 | address number low |
ahigh | 127 | address number high |
astrlow | 123R | address number low as a… |
PATCO GTFS Maintaining
Google came up with an awesome specification for transit data: GTFS. Many transit agencies publish their schedules as GTFS for Google and other developers to use in transit applications; PATCO does not currently publish theirs as GTFS. This project takes the data from the PATCO PDF schedules, and transforms them into GTFS.
Stormfighter Commenting
Stormfighter is a mapping project designed to optimize the Philadelphia Water Department's efforts in mitigating sewer overflow during rainstorms. The project identifies Water Department-installed stormwater mitigation technologies (such as green roofs, tree trenches, and rain barrels) overlaid on a graduated map of the city's permeable surfaces. This provides data on places where permeability is low, but stormwater mitigation technologies are not installed - in other words, places where flooding is most likely to occur.
You Need to Eat This Commenting
A civic project to assist tourists and locals to quickly navigate to quality food experiences.
Data Science for Civic Hackers Hibernating
IPython Notebooks on Data Science for Civic Hackers
Instead of an app, my plan is to create a set of IPython notebooks on how civic hackers can do data science effectively. We are currently experiencing a surge of new data and tools that can help us derive conclusions from the data. Software packages containing methods from Statistics, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence have been open-sourced and available for all to use. Like all tools, however, you have to know how to use these methods effectively. There are other great IPython notebooks out there related to…
Electronic Intern Drifting
Electronic Intern
Electronic Intern will help the PhillyASAP program maintain their listing of after-school programs in Philadelphia. Instead of having interns spend all summer cold-calling these programs, Electronic Intern will send automated calls that will direct the location to either send in their details by fax, a submit form on the website or press "4" to be directed back to PhillyASAP.
Written in Python, using Twilio's voice API.
Philly Bike Coalition Survey App Maintaining
Project Summary
Each year, the Philadelphia Bike Coalition oversees an army of volunteers to collect bike ridership data across the city of Philadelphia. Today, the data collection and data analysis processes are all completed with the use of pen, paper, and lots of data entry.
We want to help the Bike Coalition (and any future users) spend less time with data management grunt work so that they can spend more time using the data!
Instead of using paper forms, we aim to provide a digital solution allowing survey volunteers to collect data with a mobile-ready website (or hybrid…
Kiqstnd Bootstrapping
A bike parking locator that allows users to find Bike Parking published through Open Data Philly and allows for user input to display parking they've discovered. In addition, a map overlay of Bike Theft data would be able to be toggled to show theft by month and year.
This project has not had much activity since its inception in October 2013 but I would love to kickback the Kiqstnd, and get this going again!!!
Are you interested in working on a cool Bicycle App?
Kiqstnd needs you.
Enter/Return Commenting
Original Idea: http://studiocns.org/enterreturn/
To see the underlying resource data, look at the networkofcare_lat_lng.csv within the /data folder.
myPhillyRising Commenting
myPhillyRising
A mobile web app by OpenPlans to support the outreach work of the PhillyRising collaborative. PhillyRising targets neighborhoods throughout Philadelphia that are plagued by chronic crime and quality of life concerns, and establishes partnerships with community members to address these issues. The PhillyRising Team coordinates the actions of City agencies to help neighbors realize their vision for their community through sustainable, responsive, and cost-effective solutions. Read more at…